About Martin Harrison Taylor

My wife and I took into our home and cared for some thirty orphans during the Revolutionary War. After the war, we and our children moved to Kentucky and located in Bourbon and Ohio counties. I was said to be honest, industrious, benevolent, mild and reticent, untainted by avarice and ambition and I glided along in the quiet under current of life from whence the purest virtues flow. While in Winchester, I exhibited the only known instance of my ill temper and ungovernable rage when a British recruiting officer at that place took a fancy to me and tried to induce me to enlist as a soldier. It was this officer's practice to gather a crowd about the tavern of nights and drink and carouse until someone became so drunk that he either took the bounty or had it slipped into his pocket. I was not a drinker so could not be causht in this way, but one night after a hard day's labor, I took a seat in a quiet retired corner and fell asleep. This officer slipped the bounty into my pocket and waited until I awoke, blandly addressed me and remarked that it was time we should go home to the barracks. I looked at him with astonishment and was informed that I was now a soldier of King George. I denied ever taking the bounty even though I had the King George coin in my pocket. I found this coin in my pocket and threw it with utmost strength at the head of the officer and flew at him with all the venom of an enraged tiger. My friends held me while the King's representative beat a hasty retreat. Jane and I settled far back in the woods and with a single horse, I commenced clearing and cultivating the forest. The horse had to be belled and turned out at night and hunted up in the morning. I carried my gun whenever in the woods and had just shot a deer when I heard a turkey gobble, then another, and then another until a ring formed around me. I comprehended this danger and turned my horse toward home at utmost speed to find there was an Indian raid upon the adjoining settlement. My wife and I went tot eh nearest fort. We raised a large family and built a mill on a stream in Frederick Co by which the main road passed leading from the east across the Alleghany Mountains to the then great west. I was known as an honest miller.We raised a family of eight sons and four daughters and acquired property. As long as health and strength permitted, our house was the resort of the sick and afflicted who needed aid, of the gay and witty who wished to measure lances with the unpolished backwoods wit and humor and sarcasm of the old lady. My wife had more native good sense and natural eloquence than any woman most knew.We eventually moved to Ohio Co and bought the farm once occupied by Hamilton Barnes. We resided there until too old and feeble to keep house and then went to our son Thomas's home.